Dream Storm Sea

by A. E. Marling

  Whether the fight between the kraken and the warrior was long or short the enchantress could not say. To her it seemed an age. She wanted to cower from the sight, to deny it, but out of respect for the beautiful friend that had saved her life, Hiresha watched to the end.

  Hiresha had never witnessed a friend being devoured, and she did not care for it.

  Emesea did not scream, never more than grunted in pain. She shouted small triumphs. “Quick as spit but not fast enough.” The warrior even belted out encouragement to the swarm. “Call that a bite? I’ve had fiercer kisses, you mosquito!”

  The Fanged Typhoon flew with a crackle of fin beats. They shadowed the boat from the sunrise. Most passed over Hiresha’s head, but a few fish gusted into the base of the boat. They zipped back and forth like hornets with crescent tails. Hiresha covered her face and Tethiel’s with the oilskin sack, but she cringed and jerked in pain whenever teeth pierced her clothes.

  She beat back the few chomping at her. Above, Emesea was leaping over the boat, her arms whistling with obsidian. Fish dropped into the bilge, severed or dazed. Others in the deadly shoal chomped on their dying brethren, flipping out of the boat with them. To save them? Or to cannibalize?

  The air cleared. The swarm had swept past, leaving the bilge water red.

  Hiresha peeked. The storm towered above them, a black monstrosity shivering with magic and lightning bolts.

  She could not bear to look at Emesea. Somehow the warrior was still on her feet, if leaning against the mast and breathing wetly.

  The enchantress asked the illusionist, “Can you make us taste terrible?”

  “You mean like fish?”

  The sound of rain circled around to strike again.

  “They’re even gnawing the mast,” Tethiel said. “Tasting rotting meat would only encourage them to eat faster.”

  The enchantress did not care to imagine that. “I don’t think we could swim—”

  The tearing sound of droplets drowned her out. The Typhoon’s darkness returned. Hiresha swatted at a pain in her thigh. Two more fish latched onto her hand. She gasped.

  Emesea no longer shouted. She staggered about the boat.

  Hiresha tried to clear her mind. She cast about for her dream power, but she felt only the slime of the kraken’s venom in her nose and skin. The enchantress clawed at herself, scraping against the side of the boat to get the antimagic off. She hacked coughs. She had already vomited. Some of the glowing gel may remain in my lungs.

  The Fanged Typhoon blew past. Only then could Hiresha see that a thing in abalone armor had fallen. A fright of teeth without lips. A yellowish arch of a cheek bone. The enchantress wrenched her gaze away from Emesea, the red memory stinging the back of her eyes.

  The pain of losing a friend made her vomit again. Just as potent as the sting in her throat was a sense of strangeness. This isn’t right. Emesea wasn’t the one to die. She felt that in another place and another time, Emesea still lived. She thought if she strained she could almost remember.

  The carnage so overwhelmed Hiresha that it seemed close enough to touch. She flinched every time a tentacle was cut. The coppery blood filled her senses. Only after the struggling died out did Hiresha see it was far away. Tethiel must have caught a wind with the sails.

  In the distance, the being that once was Emesea stood on an island of crumpled flesh. The head of the kraken sagged and flattened as the warrior strode over it.

  Hiresha’s eyes stung. Her chest hurt from the spasm of sobs. She flinched when Emesea’s voice boomed.

  “Oasis City held me in darkness. It bound my hands. It starved me. I will drown its towers. I’ll grind its stones to sand.”

  The warrior leaped off the carcass. She dove, and when she struck the seafloor it sounded as a tremor. The sea moved. A trough opened, a mound of water behind it. The beginnings of a great wave, the enchantress saw. Emesea will carry a flood across a desert and through city gates.

  Hiresha had no doubt this being could destroy Oasis City. It was beyond belief, but the enchantress believed it down to the worms of pain in her stomach.

  She kneaded the length of her blue sari slung over her shoulder. The enchantress had seen Emesea savage a kraken and run off with a tsunami. She wanted to believe it too unlikely to be truth. She feared it too improbable to be a dream.

  The enchantress had promised that her escape would only bring good to the Lands of Loam. Because of her, Emesea had transformed into a walking cataclysm. If a morsel of a chance existed that this was not a dream, Hiresha knew she had to stop it.

  “Turn this boat around.” She rushed to the rigging. “To the seamount.”

  “The wind is blowing west.” Tethiel sprawled against a railing, exhausted. “We should ride it to land.”

  “I need my diamonds. I have to—”

  “We can escape this, my heart.” Tethiel’s brows inched together in concern. “This is our chance to leave the sea.”

  “Spellsword Fos might be waiting for me in Oasis City. Janny, too, and thousands of other souls.” Hiresha beat her fists against the rigging. “And Emesea will level the city.”

  “I have children there.” Tethiel grasped her wrists. His hands shook, but his voice held calm. “I’ll send them a dream. They may have time to find your friends and flee the city.”

  “That’s hardly sufficient.”

  Even when she calmed herself enough to untie the ropes and adjust the sails, she saw it was as Tethiel said. The wind defied her. If she wished to reach the seamount, she would have to swim. How she might retrieve her diamonds then reach Emesea in time to stop her, the enchantress could not guess.

  More than anything, she wished to know. She wanted to speak the keystone words that revealed if she dreamed. That would end the dream inversion, if it had not ended already. What a relief if this catastrophe never happened. The enchantress also understood the danger of that gamble. The blue dress could be reality. She would need to begin a new inversion to avert disaster, and that might take half a day, if it was even possible.

  “Oasis City will be underwater in hours.” She thumped her hands against the railing.

  I was wrong. She saw that now. Wrong to believe this a dream, to think I knew which facet was correct.

  Hiresha decided the dream inversion had not ended. She had only strained it with her disbelief. I have to think that. It’s my only chance. And if I’m still in the inversion, I should have power.

  She focused on Lightening herself, to fly. The enchantress leaped.

  Her knee skinned against the railing, and she flopped overboard.

  In one world, Emesea lived. In the other, she had died. To Hiresha it felt like holding a diamond in her fist without knowing if it was perfectly carved or broken to shards. Each second of ignorance chafed. Nothing came more naturally than the desire to open her hand, to know the absolute truth.

  “But my hand must stay shut.” The power of the dream inversion depends on it.

  “What was that?” Tethiel’s jaw pressed against her shoulder, the two crammed together in the hull of The Roost.

  The sound of rain grew to a nearing deluge. The boat bobbed downward to reveal the sun as a molten orb of shimmering heat.

  Hiresha wrung the collar of her dress. “My perspective was wrong.”

  Revelation came to her in a shattering gust. Hiresha had agonized over the similarities in her two worlds and stumbled over the discrepancies. She should have delighted in them both. They’re proof of my dream inversion.

  Tethiel shook her shoulder. “The Murderfish, she’s—”

  The boat was hurled. Tethiel and Hiresha tumbled through the air. He caught her hand. She looked down, saw a sea painted maroon with the sunrise. The Fanged Typhoon seethed from the water, a mass of silver fins ebbing and flowing, splitting apart and welding back together.

  Hiresha could not see the Murderfish, but she knew it was there. In one world the kraken died. In this one, it lives. I mustn’t distress myself with guessing whic
h facet is truth. I must embrace that each might be.

  Her mind crackled with lucid energy. She could count each ripple in the sea. They spread from tentacles that themselves were patterned in a camouflage of furrowed water. The kraken unfolded itself from the background in her eyes. It had almost reached her, its suckers the hue of fire.

  She stopped herself midair with a Lightening spell. The kraken’s arm missed, and she leaped off the back of it with Tethiel.

  The two spun upward. The storm whirled around them as a blackness alive with crimson thunderbolts. Updrafts of wild magic within the cloud burst out the top like volcanoes. She could taste the lightning, a sharp newness. The sun appeared level with the Feaster and the enchantress, and the new day had turned the sea into liquid rubies.

  Tethiel wrapped both hands around her. “This is a moment worth a lifetime.”

  Hiresha wanted to tell him so much. No need to worry. I’ll fix everything. And, This is a terrible world we live in, but you’re the one constant of undependability that makes life bearable.

  She decided on the practical. “Hold on, and hide my attacks with your magic.”

  They rode a warm storm gale downward. Holding Tethiel close, she felt a giddy swooping sensation in her core. Hiresha reached out, sensed her red diamond amid a sinking clump of compressed fish. She summoned her gem toward her. Deeper, she felt the enchanted spearhead. She had dropped it. Her connection remained, and she beckoned it to rise from the seafloor.

  The deadly shoal spewed from the waves to engulf them.

  The diamond flicked into her hand. This time when she threw it, it seemed to disappear into thin air. Tethiel had thrown a cloak of magic over her deadly jewel.

  The center of the Fanged Typhoon flashed red. The shoal crumpled inward, crushed by Attraction forces.

  The surviving fish buzzed forward in clumps then flapped away to regroup. The diminished cloud swam around the boulder of their dead comrades, and then they dove. Razor tails fled into the deep.

  The enchantress thought she should celebrate the defeat of the Fanged Typhoon. It had killed Emesea, and Hiresha had taken revenge. Yet the enchantress felt no joy in it. Blood for blood hardly seems a fair trade. Besides, she had no time. The enchantress had heard the kraken breach behind her.

  Seven tentacles spread through the air, skin like sails between them. Where the eighth arm had been was a stump of visible white in an otherwise impressive mimicry of sky and sea. Three arms reached like tongs toward Hiresha and Tethiel. Flapping suckers could seize and rip apart. The Murderfish must’ve thought to take advantage of a defenseless enchantress without a gem in her grasp.

  Hiresha made a snatching motion with her hand. She caught the enchanted spearhead. Its speed trailed a line of droplets. The silver-encrusted point was cocked over her shoulder, Lightened, and ready to be hurled at the speed of thunder.

  The enchantress aimed her throw. She knew the anatomy of the kraken now, and she lined the arrowhead up with both the brain beneath its eyes and the central heart at the back of its head.

  The Murderfish must have realized its peril. Its skin blanched in fright. It paled to the crystalline whiteness of a woman left frozen in the snow. Terrified, the kraken had never looked so human.

  Weariness of fighting felt like lead weighing down Hiresha’s arm. I’ve seen this unique creature die before. Did I kill it? She could not believe so. Grief stung her tongue like vinegar.

  As one, she lowered her bronze spike, and the kraken withdrew its arms into coils of suckers. The Murderfish’s siphon bulged with a jet of air that carried the kraken away. Hiresha rode the same salty current in the opposite direction.

  Tethiel rearranged his hands on her hips. “Was that a truce?”

  “A reprieve.”

  The kraken had harmed her friends and many others. It had also died, and one mortal punishment seemed sufficient to Hiresha for both facets.

  She touched the center of her brows then pointed to Emesea’s remains in the sea. Dead fish pooled around the drifting vest of abalone armor. “We have all of us seen enough blood. And I don’t care to honor Emesea’s death with more of the same.”

  “Death is a fit end for nothing,” he said.

  The kraken gazed up at her, its image swaying back and forth beneath the waves. Its arms splayed in and out, treading water. The motion reminded Hiresha of something the kraken had done while she had worn a blue dress. A sense of deep knowingness filled the enchantress. All this time I’ve struggled in red, and the solution was always in my other facet.

  Hiresha tucked the spearhead in her dress then caught her red diamond. She Attracted rings of water from the sea. They converged and flowed over each other. From the kraken’s vantage, they just might be seen as patterns of eyespots.

  “Its name is Skyheart,” she said to Tethiel. “After saving us from the rogue fish, the kraken tried to communicate. I never replied.”

  “And you know how to speak krakenese?”

  “I learned, in what we’ll call a dream. Now I’m telling it that each of us is the only one who can speak across the divide of land and sea. What a shame if we killed each other.”

  Tethiel chuckled at the circles of water that danced around each other. “It’s a beautiful language.”

  “And a colorful one. I only wish I could paint a better meaning.”

  “What colors do you desire?”

  “Canary yellow, and rings of violet.”

  Those hues appeared for a heartbeat. The sunlight washed them away.

  The kraken’s head compressed, and it puffed its way closer. Colors spread from the tips of its tentacles, the same hues that Tethiel had summoned. Its eyespots began to move with meaning.

  Hiresha scanned the patterns. She felt at peace, as if she drifted in the soothing waters amid a kelp forest.

  Tethiel squeezed her with his lovely crooked fingers. He asked, “What’s the message, Ambassador to Krakens?”

  She laughed. “It means I don’t know as much as I dreamed.”

  The patterns made no sense together, and three of the arms showed designs Hiresha had never seen before. She realized the language she had taken such care to learn in the other facet was not the one she needed while wearing red. The kraken’s name might not even be Skyheart.

  “Quite rude of reality not to conform to my dreams in every particular,” she said.

  The enchantress knew of only a few patterns true to this facet, the first ones she had seen on the kraken when it had lifted them in The Paragon. She repeated those back with water.

  “I know these mean something,” she said. “I hope they are some manner of greeting.”

  “In my experience, the key to being a good ambassador is not communicating at all, except in good manners.”

  Hiresha held her breath, waiting for the kraken’s reaction. Would it rage in a frenzy of tentacles? She hoped not. Her legs still tensed, ready to spring off the wave she balanced on.

  The kraken coasted underwater. Two of its arms picked up the remains of Emesea. One sucker cradled the warrior’s skull.

  Tethiel’s grip tightened. He said, “If the kraken eats her bones, you may want to reconsider the reprieve.”

  With another fuchsia-hued arm, the kraken picked up their capsized boat. The Murderfish tipped out the water, righted The Roost. It laid the warrior’s body inside the vessel.

  Hiresha let out a long breath. She realized she had been rolling the edges of the red diamond against her chest.

  The kraken rested the boat in front of them. Its suckers unlatched from the hull, and its arms lit with new patterns of lime eyespots.

  Hiresha could only guess at their meaning. An apology? A peace offering? They might even be the signs for “boat,” “death,” or “abalone shells.”

  I’ll know soon enough. Confidence warmed the enchantress’s skin at the same time an exquisite sorrow prickled her from within. Emesea would’ve loved to see the kraken’s colors.

  An image of the warrior came to
mind. She looked both familiar and strange. She wore no clothes, not even a tattoo. Her face looked wrong without a smile, and her eyes flared like green sunspots.

  Hiresha’s fall stopped above the waves. She levitated, alive again with power. The cut on her knee closed. Her sari readjusted itself around her waist. Her ribs knit. The swells and valleys of water beneath her were made of infinite facets, and each lit in their turn under the angle of the sun. Her fingers indented the sea as she pushed herself upright.

  After the death of Skyheart, Hiresha had fallen from the boat, but not into the water.

  Feet scrambled behind her. Tethiel threw one leg overboard. Then a grin barbed the corner of his lips. “I see you’re no longer in need of saving.”

  Urgency whirled in a cyclone inside Hiresha, gales of alarm that shrieked against the rock walls of her focus. She lacked the time to tell Tethiel that she would return, if she could. And if I can’t, sail to shore. Never come back to the sea. Don’t ever risk your life again.

  Hiresha touched his hand. She had to hope it would tell him enough.

  She leaped. The sea sped beneath her. Its waves were like ripples of silk. Her own dress flattened in its smoothness against her legs and waist. A fold of fabric streamed behind her left shoulder.

  In seven bounds she reached the seamount. Its caldera was dark, but even above water she detected the sparkle of her diamonds amid the coral. They converged toward her in lines of whitewater. The paragon gem burst upward. The pyramid revolved in a spinning blur of points. When the enchantress raced north, her jewels zipped in front of her then looped far back around in ellipses.

  Hiresha traveled as fast as dreams on the wind. Her quarry only moved at the speed of a tsunami. The enchantress knew she had overtaken Emesea when she saw the gorge and the hill of water. It looked like the wave of the rogue fish, and Hiresha suspected it would surge to even greater heights if Emesea’s anger reached land.

  The great waves rolled forward in a spearhead formation. Hiresha dove at the foremost point. The sea boomed with Emesea’s footfalls. The sediment she kicked from the ocean floor billowed in a dust storm. Sharks and a great platehead fled. Kelp forests flattened. Reefs shook and fractured.